


when the city goes silent

by softheartelectricsoul



Series: Lay All Your Love On Me [1]
Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF), The Stand - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Angst, Cults, Dreams, Everyone is Dead, Except Flagg, Flagg can go fuck himself, Gen, Heavy Angst, I'd like to apologize to everyone in this fic, Las Vegas, Lou gets brainwashed by Flagg, No Ending, Plague, Post-Apocalypse, Prequel to Phan, Suicide, The Stand, no one is happy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-28
Updated: 2017-11-28
Packaged: 2019-02-08 00:23:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12852717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/softheartelectricsoul/pseuds/softheartelectricsoul
Summary: PJ coughed, twice.=It all goes downhill from there.





	when the city goes silent

**Author's Note:**

> And sometimes I just want to sit around  
> And gaze at my shoes  
> And let your dirty sadness fill me up  
> Just like a balloon

The last place I expected to be when the plague struck was Las Vegas, Nevada.

I'd dragged Lou, Chris, and PJ along for friendly antics on my 25th birthday, which may or may not have included lots of dancing, lots of fancy restaurants, and no regrets.

  


* * *

  


PJ coughed, twice. He blinked and took a deep breath.

“I'm fine,” he said, brightly. “So, we are gonna see the show?”

He infected fifty people on the way there, and another twenty in the theatre.

  


* * *

  


“The airline cancelled the flight,” Lou said. “We're stuck in the States.”

She sat down and put her head in her hands.

Chris was standing in the doorway of the gaudy Vegas hotel room where our best friend died.

“God help us,” he said. “God help us all.”

I cried a lot, those days.

  


* * *

  


Vegas was the new DC.

They'd roped in all sorts of engineers and accountants and lawyers to help with the rebuilding of society.

I didn't have much of a problem with that, except the fact that three YouTubers weren't much help in the grand scheme of things.

But there was someone. Someone at the top, someone to organise it all. I'd never seen him, never heard of him, but I figured he must be some charitable and charismatic tycoon.

Chris, however, had a completely different story.

  


* * *

  


“There's something wrong with Him,” Chris whispered.

I sighed, and glanced at the clock.

“It's three in the morning, Chris, we have a class tomorrow.”

“No, no, no. The Walkin' Dude. The Dark Man. Randall Flagg. Whatever you want to call him. There's some sort of... radiation of pure evil off him. I don't trust him. The room gets physically colder when he's around. Just listen to me, I met him today, he said he was checking out the public works, there's a smile on his face but it's just so wrong, he's not human—”

I hung up.

We found his dead body in the bathtub the next morning.

  


* * *

  


Lou and I sort of grew apart after that.

She dealt with her grief by jumping straight into work, not missing a beat. She signed up for hundreds of classes and started hanging out with  this higher-up named Catherine.

I dealt with my grief by sleeping.

A lot.

But it was for a sort of purpose, you see.

When I slept, I dreamt, and the dreams were interesting, to say the least.  
  
He's not human, Chris has said, and in my dreams, I found that to be true.

He was chaos behind the kaleidoscope of his eyes, all of him Satan and Set and all the gods of evil and darkness there had ever been.

And he ruled the survivors of humanity.

  


* * *

  


Lou checked her watch. “Hurry up, we've got to get to our tech class.” _Which I will skip to go to the library,_  my mind added.

“We've still got ten minutes, and the class isn't even compulsory,” I complained, drinking a bowl of soup.

“Do you ever have dreams?” I asked.

Her face turned red. “I never have dreams,” she snapped. “Shut up.”

“Lou, come on. I know something's wrong. Everything's wrong. After—”

Lou slapped me. “Shut the fuck up, Lester. I won't hear anymore of this blasphemy.”

She knocked over my soup and left me with a blotch on my face and a hole in my heart.

  


* * *

  


I ran.

I ran until the borders fell behind me and my lungs gave out and I collapsed panting in the desert and the world seemed to be a hateful blur.

And then I thought what many had thought before but all had failed to carry out.

It was a burning thought, almost religious, almost euphoric. A simple sentence.

_I am going to kill Randall Flagg._

The thought set fire to my mind and the desert.


End file.
